The flavor of minerality in wine

Both Mouton and Margaux 2021 were released en primeur at €420 per bottle ex-Bordeaux, down 2.8% on the 2020-vintage debut last year, according to Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade. While the market dynamics vary between these two First Growths, their 2021 grands vins were being sold en primeur as the cheapest of the last four vintages – below current prices on 2018, 2019 and 2020. Merchants were offering Mouton 2021 and Margaux 2021 at £5,100 (12x75cl in bond). Initial signs suggested t ...

Last year, there was much mirth on wine Twitter about a particularly excruciating tasting note. You’re right. The wine trade needs to get out more. But still… this one was a beauty. It began well enough – really quite beautiful, in fact. But before long the imaginative descriptions were getting more ornate and strained. It moved from poetic to meaningless before finishing with a reference to Burnt Norton – the first of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets – that put it firmly in Private Eye magazine’s ...

Kimberly Nicholas PhD (@KA_Nicholas) is a sustainability scientist at Lund University, and author of Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World  Our 2020 research found that how fast we succeed at stopping warming will determine how much of the wine-growing regions and their characteristic varieties we love will remain in our lifetimes.  Changing to warmer-climate varieties can help limit losses, but there are limits to adaptation.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. ...